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Saturday, 10 September 2016

Plucking up courage or an ExTex update

I told you in my last post about ExTex 5 about the long print I made. I used a long piece of brown packaging paper, acrylic paints, my own stamps and some dye.

Kim had suggested I ironed some lightweight interfacing on the back and cut it into 6 pieces. It took me a while to pluck up the courage to even iron the interfacing on. But I did.

And then I cut it into six pieces. This makes them a peculiar size. Just something else to deal with.

Then I was a bit stuck with no idea what to do next. I can sort of see the big picture of the end result but not quite how to get there. So I decided to take each photo and manipulate the image. Here's just one of the set of images on an A4 sheet of paper.

I did something similar with each original photo. Then I got together some paper torn out of a book of sea poems, some fabrics previously painted in similar colours to those in the photos above, a marine chart and two stamps I previously made of seabirds. Before I started auditioning bits for small collages on top of the backgrounds, I cut the original pages down a bit.

Still lots more work to do. Sorting out the collages and how to fix them. Then stitching! Probably hand stitching but maybe I'll pluck up more courage and use the sewing machine as well.

I am currently thinking these pages will become a zigzag book but who knows

Interesting ideas. Like you I would be hesitant to cut the long strip because there is no turning back, and you are then left with smaller pieces which are probably similar in size to your usual work. But I like the end effect and what you have done with them as ideas. The colours are lovely and the design reminds me of bunting and the sea.